Policy Statement
by
H. E. ZHANG Chunjiang
Vice Minister of Information Industry
People's Republic of China

Monday, 18 March 2002

«Bridging the Digital Divide – a Permanent Theme in the Telecommunication Development»

Mr. Chairman,
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am very pleased to attend this conference. This conference is of great significance in the context that profound changes are taking place in the global economy and the telecom industry is facing a series of challenges. First of all, please allow me to express my sincere gratitude to the ITU and the Turkish Government, the host of this Conference, for their great hospitality and thoughtful arrangements. I wish this conference every success.

I would like to take this opportunity to share with you my views on the theme of bridging the digital divide.

Every country should attach great importance to the digital divide

Since the first World Telecom Development Conference in 1994, a large number of developing countries have witnessed remarkable developments in their telecom infrastructure. The telecom industry has definitely played a pro-active role in the economic development and social progress of each country. There remains, however, the problem of digital divide globally. The imbalance in the telecom development of different countries has yet to be solved. The digital divide between many developing countries and the developed countries has grown even wider instead of narrowing down.

The current digital divide is shown in three respects: 1. The developing countries lag far behind the developed countries in terms of telecom and informatization development. The resources are distributed in extreme imbalance. One quarter of the ITU Member States have a telephone penetration rate below 1%. Over one fourth of the total world population is underserved by telephone service. In contrast, 23 developed countries which account for only 15% of the world population own 62% of the telephones of the world. 2. There exists great imbalance between the developed area and the underdeveloped area within the developing country in terms of telecom infrastructure. In such a country, about 80% of telephone lines are located in the urban area whereas 60% of the population lives in the rural area. 3. Too much information resource over the Internet is concentrated in only a small group of developed countries. At present, 81% of the web pages over the Internet are developed in English, while less than 20% of the web pages in other languages. There are almost 3000 worldwide large-sized databases, of which 70% are located in the United States. The cultural diversity of mankind is facing grim challenges.

Generally speaking, the telecom service and informatization development of a country reflects its economic, technological, cultural and educational developments. The digital divide is caused by the imbalance of social-economic developments among different countries. Therefore, the fundamental approach to bridging the digital divide is to improve the overall national strength and civilization of the developing country. In the context of economic globalization, the task of bridging the digital divide is increasingly urgent. If the digital divide is left to grow on itself instead of being effectively controlled, not only the developing country, but also the whole telecom industry of the world will be victimized. Just as the economic globalization needs the participation of the developing country, the world telecom industry needs the common development of all the countries. The international community should reach consensus in this respect, and consider and deal with the digital divide issue from the perspective of globalization and in light of the development strategy of the 21st century, with a view of bridging the digital divide and promoting the concerted development of the world telecom industry.

China has reaped notable achievements in its effort to bridge the digital divide

During more than 20 years of reform and opening-up, China has been always committed to speeding up the telecom infrastructure construction, bridging the gap between itself and the developed country, and promoting the common development among different parts of the country. At present, China has set up a national telephone network featuring nationwide coverage, worldwide connectivity, sophisticated technology and service diversity. Its total subscriber base is 330 million and its telephone penetration rate is 25.9%. The long distance transmission, telephone switching and mobile communications have been digitalized. The total bandwidth of the international gateways of the Internet has reached 7.6G. The telecom industry of China has transformed from a bottleneck to the economic development 20 years ago into a leading and mainstay industry of strategic significance driving the whole economy right now. China’s network has ranked up rapidly from the fifteenth in 1990 and fourth in 1995, to second worldwide at present in terms of the network size and scale. In particular, the mobile network ranks the first worldwide and stands at the technical forefront of the world. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people, including the Tibetan people on the roof of the world, are enjoying an increasingly wider range of benefits brought along by SPC phones, mobile handsets and the Internet. According to the current Tenth Five Year Plan of China (2001-2005), by the year 2005, the country is expected to have 500 million telephone subscribers in total, with a telephone penetration rate of 40% and an Internet access penetration rate of 15%, and to have the largest-sized telecom network worldwide. We will continue striving for these goals and make greater contribution to bridging the digital divide.

The telecom industry of China has narrowed the gap with the developed country within a short timeframe. The underlying cause is that we have blazed out a road with Chinese characteristics based on our actual conditions and the philosophy of “the development goes as the top priority”. During the past more than 20 years, the Government has given priority and support to the telecom infrastructure construction as the cornerstone of the whole economy, leading to the creation of an environment where the entire society is favorable to the telecom industry. As for the development model, we have combined the introduction and absorption of foreign expertise with self renovation, skipped the stage of the traditional technical development, and spent only less than two decades in covering a distance which many developed countries have spent dozens of years in covering. Besides, we have persistently made use of both the state policy and market mechanism, tapped fully both the international and the domestic resources and markets, and addressed well the construction capitalization issue. As for the management institution and development mechanism, we actively promoted reform and innovation, separated business from government, strengthened governmental regulation, broken up monopoly and introduced competition. As a result, the telecom industry has been invigorated greatly.

We have constantly taken the concerted development among different parts of the country as a long-term development strategy, which we pursue and implement unswervingly. By leveraging the policy of subsidizing the West by the East and the rural area by the urban area, the telecommunications in underdeveloped areas have been promoted. Consequently the optical backbone network has reached all the remote provinces and ethnic autonomous regions. The rural telecom tariff has been greatly lowered to the same level in the urban area even when the construction cost in rural area is much higher than that of the urban area. At the same time, we make great effort to setting up the universal service fund, so as to ensure institutionally the concerted development.

With an aim of bridging the gap with the developed country, China is implementing its strategy of driving industrialization by means of informatization, as is to transform the traditional industries by making use of the information technology so as to make the productive force to grow by folds. Under the guiding principles of “active promotion, strengthened management, enhancing the merits and avoiding the demerits, leveraging external strengths”, we make great efforts in promoting the Internet growth, developing the Chinese software, information source and database. Digital libraries and digital museums in various areas have been set up, with the classics and ancient literary records of China catalogued and processed electronically, with an aim of spreading and promoting the excellent historical and cultural heritage of the Chinese people over the Internet.

To bridge the digital divide requires the joint efforts of the whole international society

It is the shared responsibility of every country to achieve common development of the world telecom industry as a whole. It is necessary for the developed country and the developing country to cooperate with each other on the basis of mutual benefit. For this purpose, we call for:

1. the developing countries to explore with their own efforts ways of development suitable to their national realities. The developed country should help the developing country to improve the telecom infrastructure as one of its obligations, and to make concrete actions to bridge the digital divide, e.g., to promote the cooperation on technology, capitalization and human resources, and to lower the network access fee for the developing country. As a developing country, China is committed to wider range of international cooperation with other countries in general, the developing countries in particular, and to promote the common development.

2. the International Telecommunication Union to play a more important role in bridging the digital divide. For many years, the ITU has made many fruitful efforts and great contribution in this respect. ITU should make further efforts and set up effective coordination mechanism in the fields of technical cooperation, business exchange, human resource development and consultation. In addition, I hope that ITU will become more involved and plays a leading role in the management of the Internet.

3. more efforts to promote the cultural diversity of the network. While the network protocols need to be unified, the network culture should be diversified. Every country should take effective measures addressing gradually the issue of the imbalance in the content resources in different languages over the Internet, promoting the dissemination of the history and culture of the developing country, and making the Internet a more accommodating space culturally. At the same time, the international cooperation needs to be strengthened to combat the cyber crime in all forms, in a bid to protect and preserve the security of the network and information.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my friends: The 21st century is a century full of both challenges and promises. I believe that the digital divide will be effectively bridged and the common development and prosperity of the global telecom industry as a whole will be achieved, as long as all the countries around the world work closely together and make further efforts.

Thank you all.